“To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time.”
Leonard Bernstein ought to have known. He had only 72 years to become this country’s most visible, extraordinarily versatile classical musician, as a conductor, composer, pianist, Broadway luminary, educator, author, and humanitarian. (I’m sure I left something out.)
Happy birthday, Lenny. Thanks for making the most of the time you were given.
Bernstein talks Beethoven at the piano with Maximilian Schell – and ever-present cigarette
“Rhapsody in Blue” from the keyboard, with the fearless Stanley Drucker on clarinet
Bernstein conducts “Prelude, Fugue and Riffs” on “Omnibus” in 1955
Bernstein and Aaron Copland create demo record of “Fancy Free” for Jerome Robbins. Stick around for commentary at the end, with self-incriminating interjection by Copland!
Bernstein’s sensational eleventh-hour debut with the New York Philharmonic, at 25, in 1943
Bernstein’s European conducting debut, with the Czech Philharmonic in 1946
An entire playlist of Bernstein rarities!
Conducting Shostakovich in Tokyo
Conducting Haydn – with his face
Lauren Bacall sings “The Saga of Lenny,” lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (with apologies to Kurt Weill), for Bernstein’s 70th birthday celebration
Bernstein’s death reported on ABC News in 1990
Bernstein conducts his recently-composed “Candide Overture” on a televised Young People’s Concert in 1960
Bernstein conducts Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony” as a memorial tribute, broadcast live, two days after the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963
On the evening of July 22, 1977, as I stood in line in the lobby of the Boyd Theatre in Bethlehem, PA, the doors to the auditorium swung open, and the audience for the previous showing began to file out. Someone in line asked, “How was it?” He received the flat, noncommittal response, “It was a big fish.”
Even at the age of 11, I knew “Orca” was going to suck. Heavily promoted on the back of every Marvel comic for weeks, the poster art featured an improbably large, breaching killer whale, looking all the world like a mottled Moby-Dick, splintering the hull of a ship, against the backdrop of an entire seaside village in flames, and a miniscule seaman (presumably Richard Harris) defying this vengeance-fueled juggernaut with a harpoon the size of a toothpick. The entire enterprise bore the unmistakable aroma of desperate hyperbole.
This week on “Roy’s Tie Dye Sci Fi Corner,” we finally honor a long-term request from viewer Lesley Siedt to sink our teeth into “Orca.”
Clearly intended to inspire awe, the Marvel ad couldn’t disguise the fact that “Orca” was a transparent “Jaws” cash-grab, with perhaps a little “King Kong” and maybe some “Death Wish” tossed into the mix. Executive producer Dino De Laurentiis’ “Kong” remake had only just been in theaters in December, and “Death Wish” made him a mint in 1973.
Either way, the audience is clearly meant to sympathize with the aquatic avenger. And why not? Harris’ character is a jerk. And supposedly the actor wasn’t much better on set. He insisted on performing his own stunts, nearly getting himself killed, spent most of the shoot inebriated, contemplated murdering his wife and her suspected lover, and punched out producer Luciano Vincenzoni. If only the actual film had conveyed as much drama. On Rotten Tomatoes, its current approval rating is 9 percent.
You can’t argue with the cast, which includes, beside Harris, Charlotte Rampling, Will Sampson, Bo Derek, and Keenan Wynn. But nobody behaves in a way that makes sense, and at the end of the day, there’s little to do but get picked off one by one.
Composer Ennio Morricone clearly perceived it as a western, providing an underscore of melancholy guitar, an air of heartbreak in the strings, and none other than Edda dell’Orso lending her wordless soprano, so indelibly associated with “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
I’ve got to hand it to my parents. We were a moviegoing family, and we saw everything, the good, the bad and the ugly. As my stepfather, bearing equally low expectations, observed, “If it’s produced by De Laurentiis, it’s got to stink.” A gross generalization, admittedly, but he was kind of right: approached in the correct frame of mind, a De Laurentiis film seldom disappointed.
We’ll blubber over this tragic tale of lost love and the destructive consequences of reckless greed on the next Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner. Bring your seals (of approval) to the comments section, when we livestream on Facebook, this Friday evening at 7:30 EDT!
The Boyd Theatre was my favorite venue in the Lehigh Valley at which to view movies. It was the only theater that did the big movies justice, an old-fashioned movie palace that somehow still offered decent projection and stirring sound. Opened in 1921, it was demolished only this year. What rises in its place? A 14-story “luxury apartment” building. Nice job, Bethlehem. It breaks my heart a little every time I think that the Boyd’s gone.
It turns out that there CAN be sound in space. Who knew?
For the first time, NASA has extracted and made audible sound waves from a black hole. But is it really something you’d want to hear? Up close and personal, I mean.
One scientist compares it to “a beautiful Hans Zimmer score” – an oxymoron if ever there was one.
Granted, it’s not something you would be able to hear with the naked ear as you were hurtling toward the event horizon.
Let me know what you’d prefer to be listening to on your earbuds in the final moments before you’re violently spaghettified.
I was watching a film on Netflix the other night called “The Dig” (2021), starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes, about the archaeological excavation at Sutton Hoo, Suffolk, in 1939 that uncovered an Anglo-Saxon ship burial. The film is based on a novel of the same name by John Preston, inspired by true events.
Interestingly, at a point one of the characters (a fictionalized version of real-life archaeologist Peggy Piggot, played by Lily James) relates an anecdote about the cellist Beatrice Harrison, who used to rehearse in her garden, to the delight of the resident nightingales, who would allegedly join in. A live radio broadcast of Harrison playing “Londonderry Air” (a.k.a. “Danny Boy”) in a kind of avian duet is said to have entranced over a million listeners.
I did a search on YouTube, and lo and behold! Recordings of these unusual collaborations exist! Apparently the original 10-inch shellac gramophone discs, issued by HMV in 1927, proved extremely popular.
Whether it was faked or not, it’s a lovely illusion. I for one wish to hang on to it.
Harrison is best-known to collectors for having made the first recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto, with the composer conducting. She also gave first performances of a number of works by Frederick Delius, including his Double Concerto (with her sister, May Harrison, as the violin soloist).
In addition, she wrote an autobiography, “The Cello and the Nightingales.”
Harrison plays Elgar’s Cello Concerto
Delius without nightingales, but a nice picture of Harrison with a terrier (she was also a great dog lover)
Throughout his career, Ken Russell alternately tickled and tried the patience of audiences and critics alike with his excesses in films like “The Devils” (1971), “Tommy” (1975), “Gothic” (1986), and “Salome’s Last Dance” (1988). (The latter was memorably reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and given a rating of three question marks.)
But he had a parallel fascination with the great composers and also directed features or short subjects about Bartók, Bax, Bruckner, Delius, Elgar, Mahler, Martinu, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, and perhaps most notorious of all, Franz Liszt.
In “Lisztomania” (1975), The Who’s Roger Daltrey plays Liszt and Wagner is portrayed as a kind of zombie-Nosferatu-Frankenstein’s monster-Hitler, whose electric guitar doubles as a machine gun. (I’m not kidding.)
Occasionally, Russell also directed staged opera, including a production of Boito’s “Mefistofele,” with Faust reimagined as an aging hippie.
On Claude Debussy’s birthday, would you buy Oliver Reed as the great French composer? Why not?
